Sunday, April 14, 2013

The latest Access Copyright lawsuit against York University and renewed attempt to force every post-secondary and K-12 to pay Access Copyright's tariff is an opportunity to look at their "intellectual property" and approaches in new ways. For example, it just dawned on me that academic authors may be in a position of indirectly suing their employers, through their publishers, represented by Access Copyright and other members of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFFRO) as well as pushing for draconian tracking regimes that threaten our own academic freedom.

For example, one of the members of the IFFRO is the UK's Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA). One of the members of CLA is the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). Members of ALPSP obviously are learned and professional society publishers, including the American Chemical Society (ACS) Publications Division, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier Ltd., Oxford University Press, Sage Publications, and Taylor & Francis, to name a few.

Scholars working at York University publish their work in journals owned by ALPSP members, who then work indirectly through the IFFRO and Access Copyright to sue the employer of their authors, York University. I have a strong hunch that there are some very interesting legal and strategic implications here.

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Access Copyright has a LOT of nerve for thinking that teaching our kids is all about creating an "educational market" to funnel money into their pockets.

Like most people in academia, I do a lot of writing - creating original works which I share openly with others (for evidence, see the other writings and links on this blog!). Post-secondary institutions are net creators of copyrighted works - by far. IF it made any sense to be sending cheques for use of copyrighted works, they should be flowing FROM Access Copyright to universities and colleges! Not that I agree with this approach, this is just to illustrate how absurd this situation is.

Maybe you're not an academic - but do you post your pictures on flickr or videos on YouTube for anyone to view or download? If so, you're a creator of copyrighted content. Does Access Copyright represent you?

As for the K-12 sector: the companies and occasional individuals behind Access Copyright have an obligation, just like the rest of us, to help the next generation get a start in life. You should be donating works to your local schools and helping out by providing free author talks. If you can't be bothered with this, at least don't sue our school systems.

As a prolific writer and open access activist, I am very proud to say that I am NOT A MEMBER of Access Copyright.

Friday, April 05, 2013

Third update April 7: this is a brief statement which I think captures the essence of the problem. Thanks to participants in the open science list for helping to clarify things. I won't copy and paste all of the discussion, but would suggest that anyone interested sign up.

The Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable, a student-led organization with a stated affinity for industry and a long list of industry sponsors, has posted an open access survey on its website. The preamble to the survey suggests that this is a survey conducted by this student-led organization for its own purposes, while the fine print at the bottom of the survey clearly indicates that this a survey sponsored by an unknown entity. The reason that this is problematic is that when research is conducted in this manner, the sponsoring entity could then easily present the results as the "student viewpoint". This would be as simple as copying and pasting from the preamble. I have no way of knowing whether this is intent of the industry sponsor or whether OBR deliberately markets their services in this way. However, this is a problematic survey and OBR should take steps to at minimum correct the preamble to reflect the industry sponsorship.

The relevant sections:

Preamble:

Thank you very much for taking part in this study on European trends in Open Access Publishing by the Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable, a UK-based student-led organisation. It should take ~7 minutes to complete. Your answers will help us to gain valuable insight into the Open Access use among academics in your field.

Fine print at the bottom of the form:

Our sponsors pay a fee to OBR for
gathering, aggregating and collecting the data as well as for
preparation of a Summary Report of the data compiled. In participating
in this survey, the participant recognizes that the information provided
in this survey will be used in an industry aggregate report and
therefore grants OBR unrestricted use of this information.

As universities increasingly get involved in industry partnerships, addressing the kinds of questions brought up by this survey will become increasingly important. This research which looks like it is being done by students, but actually is sponsored by industry, does not appear to have gone through a research ethics process. This is an opinion survey; even here, opinions based on this kind of "evidence" can inform public policy. A more critical question, because OBR works in the area of biotech, is whether this approach would be considered suitable in more sensitive areas such as health research. Kudos to these students for creating this innovative company - I very much encourage them to actively participate in this discussion.

Second update April 6: thanks to Tom Morris (status and affiliation unknown) on the open science list for pointing out that the fine print on the bottom of the survey form indicates that this is commercial research undertaken by this organization for pay. Here is the language on the form: "Our sponsors pay a fee to OBR for
gathering, aggregating and collecting the data as well as for
preparation of a Summary Report of the data compiled. In participating
in this survey, the participant recognizes that the information provided
in this survey will be used in an industry aggregate report and
therefore grants OBR unrestricted use of this information" from the survey form. This statement contrasts with the preamble which speaks to the "student-led organization" and the comments of Daniel Perez and Mehmet Fidanboylu who are emphasizing their student credentials. Like Tom, I would appreciate clarification of who the sponsor of this research is. Tom's post to open science and my reply will be added below.

Update April 6: Daniel Perez on the Open Science list and Mehmet Fidanboylu (see comment below) are with OBR and object strenuously to my characterizing their organization as not being student-led. Daniel points out that he started the organization while a student, and Mehmet points to the Executive Committee, which is composed of students. I was aware of this list when writing this post.

Neither Daniel nor Mehmet has provided information about who is conducting and/or sponsoring the survey. If the survey is being conducted by a "student-led" organization, then the survey should include the name(s) of the students responsible for the survey, with links to the names of their academic supervisors and research ethics clearance. Until these questions are answered, the origins of this survey remain opaque.

Daniel's comments bring up some important questions about the importance of academic freedom and independence. For this reason, I will post both Daniel's comments and my response below.

In brief, this discussion illustrates the need for academic freedom / independence. Academic freedom is far more than a nice perk for academics - it is a critical need for society as a whole. For example, one of the sponsors of this group is GlaxoSmithKline. If academics are aligned with, and funded by, GlaxoSmithKline, then this has a strong probability of making it difficult or impossible for academics to do research that is critical of this sponsor or its products. Good health information requires independent academic research.

Another question I raise in response to Daniel's comments is, considering that this group has posted a survey claiming to be conducted by a "student-led organization" without addressing traditional academic protocols such as noting authorship, sponsorship, and research ethics - does this group consider itself beyond such protocols? If so, this has some interesting and important implications, especially since this is a biotech-oriented group, so would be very likely to be involved in medical research.

I encourage both Daniel and Mehmet to actively engage in this discussion as an opportunity to consider these questions.

Original post:

Thanks to Peter Suber for the tip about yet another misleading open access survey. Following are my comments. In brief, this appears to be a curious case of two layers of smoke and mirrors about who is behind the survey that could make for an interesting question for a research methods class. The survey preamble says that this is a student-led organization. The about page claims that this is the health care and life sciences industry. The description of gold and green OA reflect the biases of the toll access scholarly publishing industry, which are at odds with those of the health care and life sciences industry. Who are you really, OBR?

The preamble starts with:

Thank you very much for taking part in this study on European trends in Open Access Publishing by the Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable, a UK-based student-led organisation.

OBR’s mission is to engage our academic and industry communities
on-campus to foster a conversation about the health care and life
sciences industry. We seek to create a global network of academic
innovators from across disciplines, to connect them with each other and
the industry resources necessary to move ideas forward.

Comment: what a way to start off a survey - lying about your organization. This is clearly an industry organization, not a student-led organization.

The background of this survey is misleading about Open Access.

OBR: Gold model: Authors pay article processing charges
(APC) to the journal for publishing the paper and making it freely
available upon publication.

Comment: as Peter Suber points out, article processing charges is just one of the business models for open access journals, and one that is used by only about half of open access journals.

Comment: the green model can involve posting a number of versions of works, from preprints to post-peer-reviewed postprints to the final published version.

Both of these definitions are suspicious, suggesting that this survey was written by a traditional scholarly publisher with a vested interest in toll access. This interest is not shared by the health care and life sciences industry. For this industry, toll access is an expense and a barrier. This suggests two levels of smoke and mirrors in this survey - pretending to be student led while the "about" page suggests the health care and life science industries while the bias in the initial question page suggests a toll access publisher.

As David Solomon notes in a comment on Suber's post, a survey like this just posted to the web which can be answered by anyone is not very meaningful, to put it mildly.

I haven't gotten into the questions per se, but would like to note that if whoever is behind this survey wants this "research" to be taken seriously, they really should come out of the closet and tell us who they are.

This survey could make an interesting question for a research methods class.

Daniel Perez' comments to the open science list (April 6, 2013)

Dear Heather – I just read your paranoid notes below (and blog) about the Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable (OBR), a student led organization - instigated by our act of conducting a survey into Open Access Publishing (how dare we?) and not living up to Paul Zuma’s standards of scholarship?

Heather: you asked: “Who are you really, OBR?” (In what appeared to be a McCarthy-esqe tone.)

Look, if you were capable of even the bare minimum of research into OBR and looked at our executive committee you would see we’re led entirely of PhD students and post-docs: http://www.oxbridgebiotech.com/about-obr/executive-committee/

As the founder and President of OBR (and PhD student at Oxford) I do not take exception towards Zuma for finding our survey methodology imperfect (when it comes to OA he’s beyond biased, but obviously raised good points).

I do, however, take exception that you then pursue some whisper campaign maligning our character and even claiming we’re not really student led.

We were founded in Oxford in June 2011, then opened a chapter in Cambridge, then London and since we’ve grown to nearly 8,000 members with additional chapters in Manchester, Glasgow (Scotland), and San Diego, Los Angeles and SF-Bay. Our goal is to foster a conversation between academics (from across disciplines) and industry experts. Look Heather, we actually don’t think “industry” is an ugly word. We welcome commerce, the commercialization of science, and the jobs and innovative products that comes from it. For you to suggest we’re just “smoke and mirrors” is border-line slanderous and I highly encourage you to avoid these Holier Than Thou witch-hunt campaigns.

But as OBR's mission is to educate, here are two simple steps to avoid repeat episodes like this:

1) Research your facts
2) Remove the tin-foil from around your head

ps. Ok I’ll admit it: we have some post-docs on our exec committee. We really are out to get to you.

Thank you for your response. To clarify, are you doing this research as a student? If so, can you point me to your academic supervisor for this study and your ethics clearance information?

In academic research it is important to state such matters as who sponsored a study, declare conflicts, etc. Look at the author guidelines of a reputable publisher such as Nature, PLoS, BMC for the kinds of information academic critics should have access.

Alternatively, perhaps you think your group is beyond such academic protocols as research ethics? If so, this has interesting implications, particularly in biotech which presumably includes medical research.

I would be interested in hearing your perspective on academic critique. What constitutes an appropriate response to critique of your approach?

Heather - It says right on the survey page that it's paid for by sponsors, so I don't think there's much mystery as to whether it's a commercial or academic survey. You can find their corporate registrations here: http://opencorporates.com/companies?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=oxbridge++roundtable&commit=Go

Daniel - Congratulations on building your company to this scale at such a young age. Since the focus of this thread is open access, can you tell who's paying for the survey? That should help provide insight into it's construction and administration.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious about your funding in overall, so if you'd like to share a more general revenue picture, that'd be awesome.

Tom

My reply (April 6, 2013)

Tom,

Thanks, this is a good point. However, this indicates a contradiction in the information provided on the survey form.

The preamble says: "Thank you very much for taking part in this study on European trends in Open Access Publishing by the Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable, a UK-based student-led organisation. It should take ~7 minutes to complete. Your answers will help us to gain valuable insight into the Open Access use among academics in your field".

This presents the survey as one conducted by a student-led organization.

The fine print at the bottom of the page says: "Our sponsors pay a fee to OBR for gathering, aggregating and collecting the data as well as for preparation of a Summary Report of the data compiled. In participating in this survey, the participant recognizes that the information provided in this survey will be used in an industry aggregate report and therefore grants OBR unrestricted use of this information".

Both Daniel Perez and Mehmet Fidanboylu in comments here and on my blog are emphasizing their status as students and listing their academic affiliations. This is deceptive.

Mehmet says: in a comment on my blog:

May be worth taking a look at these faceless execs shamelessly posing as students?

Mehmet Fidanboylu, CMO - "completing a PhD in neuropharmacology at King's College London"

It is not appropriate to conduct a survey posing as students at these institutions when you are actually undertaking commercially sponsored research.

While we are on the broad topic of transparency, could you explain who you are and what your interest is, Tom? It's hard to tell from a gmail account.

I am a professional librarian and scholar, having recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the topic of scholarly communication and open access. My interest in this is finding out who is really behind this survey and what their motivations are.

I've updated my blogpost on this topic and am encouraging Daniel and Mehmet to actively engage in this discussion as I think it gets at the heart of the very important topic of the societal need for academic freedom and independence.

The post can be found here:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/04/industry-pretends-to-be-student-led-or.html

If you would like to comment on this post, please note that this is a scholarly blog. Say who you are and give relevant background. Are you a scholar, a journalist, interested member of the public, or do you work for a publisher? Anonymous comments will not be posted. The content of this post may help to explain why.

It should come as no surprise that Elsevier's venture into "open access" involves creating a new hybrid of free and toll access. In brief, authors publishing in Elsevier's new open access journals have an option of Creative Commons licenses (good), but are also expected to sign an exclusive license agreement granting Elsevier publishing and distribution rights and leaving authors and their institutions with "copyright" and a range of scholarly use rights which is the same limited range of options available to subscription-based authors. At best, this is confusing and conflicting and should be regarded as a new form of pseudo open access.

All articles published in Elsevier Open Access Journals are peer
reviewed and upon acceptance will be immediately and permanently free
for everyone to read and download. Permitted reuse is defined by your
choice of user license.

Authors publishing in these journals will use an exclusive licensing
agreement, where they will retain copyright alongside scholarly usage
rights and Elsevier will be granted publishing and distribution rights.

At Elsevier, we request transfers of copyright, or in some cases
exclusive rights, from our journal authors in order to ensure that we
have the rights necessary for the proper administration of electronic
rights and online dissemination of journal articles. Authors and their
employers retain (or are granted/transferred back) significant scholarly
rights in their work.

How authors can use their own journal articles

Authors publishing in Elsevier journals have wide rights to use their works for teaching and scholarly purposes without needing to seek permission.

Summary: Elsevier has created a new form of pseudo-open-access combining Creative Commons licensing with exclusive copyright transfer with authors supposedly retaining "copyright" but actually retaining only very limited rights to use their own work.

If you would like to comment on this on any other post on IJPE please note that this is a scholarly blog. State who you are and any relevant affiliation - for example, are you an academic, journalist, interested member of the public, or do you work for a publishing company? Anonymous comments are not posted.

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Update April 5, 2013: Dirk Pieper of the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine reports on the BASE new OA designation (from the GOAL Open Access list). BASE has been able to confirm:

we can indicate 11.320.432 out of 43.713.380 documents almost certainly as OA. In result lists you will see the small OA symbol if a document is OA, in addition you can refine your result list to OA results only.

This 25% should be regarded as a minimum as not every repository is able to report OA contents to the BASE search harvester. Repository managers please see the GOAL list post for information on how to make OA information for contents in your repository available.

Second corrections: the title of this post has been changed to 2013 from 3013 to reflect the correct milennium, and the w in HighWire is now capitalized throughout.

Correction and clarification: the number of articles added by OASPA in 2012 was 81,780, not 25,788. This would place CC-BY growth in the same ballpark as arXiv, but still less than HighWire Press and much less than repository growth. An anonymous commenter reports the split of DOAJ articles by license type. I am not able to replicate the search and do not have contact information for this person. If anyone can explain to me how I can do a DOAJ search by license without having a specific term that would be appreciated, as would contact information for the anonymous commenter. The chart above and data below have been updated to reflect this correction.

Clarification: the BASE documents number is used as a very rough surrogate of open access growth through repositories. Not all works in repositories are open access, and not all are scholarly works. However, I argue that the sheer size of the growth strongly suggests strong growth of open access in repositories. If only 1% of the 9.2 million document growth of BASE reflects open access scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles, that would still be close to 100 thousand articles added in 2012. This consideration is described in my rationale and method. Another important point is that open access repository growth isn't just about scholarly articles - this growth reflects a lot of grey literature, for example, reports and theses that are valuable scholarly works that generally received very little dissemination in previous years, increasingly research data, and the historical works are valuable primary documents for many scholars. This is a whole range of growth of open access materials that is taking place largely within the repository movement, and very little in open access publishing.

Thanks very much to Jyrki Ilva and "Alf" the anonymous commenter for this most welcome peer review. Can this now be considered a peer-reviewed blogpost?

Highlights

This issue features a comparison of open access growth including CC-BY article growth figures supplied by OASPA. In brief: for every CC-BY article addition tracked by OASPA, repositories around the world add 359 documents as found by a BASE search, DOAJ adds 10 articles that are not CC-BY licensed (90% of DOAJ article growth), arXiv and SSRN each add 3 documents, and the Internet Archive adds lots of texts, movies, sound recordings and concerts. Recent research suggests that CC-BY is the preference of a small minority of scholars.

The top 10 growth figures by percentage for both this quarter and the past year are presented. Looking at percentage growth brings out substantial growth in initiatives with smaller numbers. Note that smaller numbers are not necessarily less significant. One open access funding agency mandate can mean free access to tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles, for example. Open access mandates are high on the list of percentage growth figures, including 26 funding agency OA mandates this quarter for a total of 80 and a growth rate of 48%. The Directory of Open Access Books is growing up leaps and bounds, or to be more specific added 13 publishers and 135 books this quarter. The usual suspects (Directory of Open Access Journals, PubMedCentral, and BASE) continue to rank highly on percentage comparisons. HighWire Press added a total of 20 totally free sites this past year for a total of 71, an impressive sixth place (not bad for an initiative that isn't focused on open access).
Kudos to DOAJ for hitting the 1 million article milestone. Bjork, Laakso, Welling and Paetau have issued a preprint of another major open access growth study, the Anatomy of Green Open Access, finding that the coverage of all journals articles as green open access is currently at 12%. Suber has posted additional figures and analysis and updated the open access by the numbers section of the Open Access Directory. New this issue is the amazing 281 billion web pages of the Internet Archive.

Full data, a word version of this commentary and jpg of the chart above are available in SFU SUMMIT.

Comparisons and CC-BY

This issue features a comparison of some of the top open access growth figures, by number and percentage for this quarter and the past year. This comparison is inspired by some of my colleagues in the open access movement who equate open access with the Creative Commons - Attribution Only license and appear to believe that this is becoming a default for open access, as illustrated by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association's odd release of CC-BY article data (this is odd because not all members use this license, and OASPA has not released data for other licenses used by members).

The chart above shows number of works added from March 31, 2012 to March 31, 2013 by source, limited to the top 9 sources of those tracked in this series plus the OASPA CC-BY figures. On the left we see that the growth of documents in repositories encompassed by a Bielefeld Academic Search Engine search dwarfs all other figures, with over 9.2 million documents added this past year. I include figures from the Internet Archive even though most are not scholarly works because this resource and the phenomenon of digitization and sharing of current and past works of various kinds is worth tracking, with this initiative being just one example. This past year IA added over 1 million texts, half a million movies, 360,000 audio recordings and close to 14 thousand concerts. The number of articles searchable at article level in the Directory of Open Access Journals grew by over 270,000. The HighWire Press free articles collection grew by over 130,000. arXiv grew by over 86,000 documents, and the Social Sciences Research Network by over 65,000 full text papers. OASPA tracked growth of over 25,000 documents.

Another way to compare these figures for CC-BY aficionados: for every CC-BY paper added by OASPA, the following were added by these services (corrected April 4, 2013):

113 BASE documents

13 Internet Archive texts

7 Internet Archive movies

5 Internet Archive recordings

3 DOAJ articles searchable at the article level

1.6 HighWire Press free articles

1 arXiv documents

Other perspectives

Of the 271,715 articles searchable at the article level added by DOAJ, the 81,780 CC-BY articles as per OASPA data represents 30%. Another way to express this is that 70% of the articles added to the DOAJ article search in 2012 are NOT CC-BY. (Updated April 4, 2013).

Most of the journals participating in HighWire Press are fairly traditional scholarly society journals. These journals are providing access to free articles at a rate 1.6 times higher than the CC-BY group. (Corrected April 4, 2013 - was 5).

This portion of the T&F OA survey supports arguments that scholars as a group do not support the Creative Commons - Attribution Only license (CC-BY), but rather when using CC licenses tend to prefer more restrictive licenses, with CC-Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) being the most popular option. There was strong support for text and data mining. There was an interesting difference in reaction to pre-approving translations (largely positive) and adapations as a whole (largely negative), suggesting the possibility of a more nuanced approach such as ND with preapproval of translations outside the CC license per se. Attribution is taken as a given; further research into the question of attribution might be merited as attribution may not be advisable in the case of research data and the norms for attribution can vary, for example with scholarship and Wikipedia. This portion of the survey indicates support for Taylor and Francis traditional practices (Exclusive License to Publish and Copyright Transfer), which is not surprising considering the survey pool (scholars connected with T&F) and high probability of bias in these responses.

Details

This is the third post in my Taylor and Francis Open Access Survey critique series covering p. 8 - 10 of the results of this survey, on Attitudes and values regarding the dissemination of your research and Licenses. Please see the main post above for overall critique of this survey. In brief, social science research intended to inform public policy should not be conducted by a commercial entity with a stake in the outcome (this is fox researches hen research), and the survey as a whole is significantly flawed methodologically. The following comments should be interpreted in the light of this overall critique.

Taylor & Francis questions are in bold.

What are your attitudes and values regarding the dissemination of your research? p. 8 (14,533 respondents)

It is acceptable for ... without my prior knowledge or permission, provided I receive credit as the original author.

Comment: this question assumes attribution as a given. For further research, it should be noted that there are reasons to question the assumption of attribution. For example, with data sharing public domain (not attribution) may be preferable, and some scholars are experimenting with contributing to Wikipedia, which uses attribution but in a different way (authors are anonymous).

The strongest support was for my work to be re-used for non-commercial gain, with 64% either agreeing or strongly agreeing. This was followed by others to use my work in text - or data-mining with 48% agreeing or strongly agreeing. Translations and including works in an anthology received only slightly less support.

Respondents reacted negatively to others to use my work for commercial gain with 67% agreeing or strongly agreeing and others to adapt my work with 50% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing.

Licenses (p. 9) (13,143 respondents)

Please indicate in each case if you would be willing to sign the license when publishing your research (Response options: Yes, always; Only in certain circumstances; No, never).

Response options included a variety of Creative Commons licenses, with a significant omission: the Sharealike option, along with License to Publish and Copyright Transfer. The most popular response was Creative Commons - Attribution - Noncommercial - NoDerivatives CC-BY-NC-ND with 71% responding Yes, always.

Exclusive License to Publish and Copyright Transfer were only slightly less popular. I am inclined to discount these responses because of the obvious strong likelihood of social desirability and acquiescence biases, that is, this is a T&F survey which is likely to elicit positive responses to T&F practices (see the main post in this series for detailed explanation and references); also the pool of respondents are obviously a group that continues to work with this traditional publisher ("Yes, always" actually defines the group), and respondents in favor of the publisher's practices may have been more likely to respond.

Please choose your most preferred, and your second most preferred, of the above licences.

Please choose your least preferred of the above licences.

Responses show a similar pattern to the questions on the page above. The most popular option was CC-BY-NC-ND. CC-BY elicited a strong negative reaction.

The response bias discussed above should be taken into account in interpreting the apparent popularity of traditional Taylor & Francis practices (Exclusive License to Publish, Copyright Transfer). That is, the survey population consists of scholars who work with Taylor & Francis; scholars who favor T&F practices may have been more likely to respond to the survey; and of respondents, there is a strong likelihood of social desirability and acquiescent response biases.

Discussion

This section of the survey supports the argument that many scholars do not support the Creative Commons - Attribution Only license (CC-BY), but rather when using CC licenses prefer more restrictive licenses, in this case with CC-BY-NC-ND being the top preference. Other evidence supporting this argument comes from Nature Publishing Group's analysis of author choices for Scientific Reports, referenced from here, which offers a range of CC licenses and found that CC-BY is selected by only 5% of scholars.

This is important because many open access advocates equate open access with the CC-BY license. I argue that the similarity between CC-BY and the open access definition of the Budapest Open Access Initiative is superficial in nature, that CC-BY has both positive and negative implications for scholarship, and as a default has significant loopholes which would present an ongoing danger to open access. My work in this area can be found in my Open Access and Creative Commons critique series.

The detailed questions about re-use are somewhat useful in indicating what kinds of re-use scholars are likely to be willing to grant. Noncommercial, text and data-mining, translations and including works in anthologies are all supported by many scholars. The difference between adaptions (negative reaction) and translations (positive reaction) is interesting, as this suggest that while scholars do not necessarily want to grant blanket rights for all kinds of derivatives, many would be okay with blanket permissions for translations. This suggests that a more nuanced approach might be worthwhile, for example perhaps NoDerivs with pre-approval of translations handled outside of the CC license per se.

The results of this survey also show that respondents to a T&F survey tend to respond favorably to T&F traditional practices. This is evidence of ongoing support for T&F, which may not be necessary given that authors and editorial boards continue to work with this publisher; beyond that, given the high probability of bias, this finding should be largely discounted.